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Economics of the Internet Cloud Part 1

December 13, 2016 — netequalizer

By Art Reisman

CTO, APconnections

Why is it that you need to load up all of your applications and carry them around with you on your personal computing device ? From I-bird Pro, to your favorite weather application, the standard operating model assumes you purchase these things , and then affix them to your medium of preference.

Essentially you are tethered to your personal device.

Yes there are business reasons why a company like Apple would prefer this model. They own the hardware and they control the applications, and thus it is in their interest to keep you walled off and loyal to your investment in Apple products.

But there is another more insidious economic restriction that forces this model upon us. And that is a lag in speed and availability of wireless bandwidth. If you had a wireless connection to the cloud that was low-cost and offered a minimum of 300 megabits access without restriction, you could instantly fire up any application in existence without ever pre-downloading it. Your personal computing device would not store anything. This is the world of the future that I referenced in my previous article , Will Cloud Computing Obsolete Your Personal Device?

The X factor in my prediction is when will we have 300 megabit wireless bandwidth speeds across the globe without restrictions ? The assumption is that bandwidth speed and prices will follow a similar kind of curve similar to improvements in computing speeds, a Moore’s law for bandwidth if you will.

It will happen but the question is how fast, 10 years , 20 years 50 years? And when it does vendors and consumers will quickly learn it is much more convenient to keep everything in the cloud. No more apps tied to your device. People will own some some very cheap cloud space for all their “stuff”, and the device on which it runs will become less and less important.

Bandwidth speed increases in wireless are running against some pretty severe headwinds which I will cover in my next article stay tuned.

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